"Music is the effort we make to explain to ourselves how our brains work. We listen to Bach transfixed because this is listening to a human mind."
-Lewis Thomas
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"Medical knowledge and technical savvy are biodegradable. The sort of medicine that was practiced in Boston or New York or Atlanta fifty years ago would be as strange to a medical student or intern today as the ceremonial dance of a !Kung San tribe would seem to a rock festival audience in Hackensack.“
-Lewis Thomas
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"Ants are so much like human beings as to be an embarrassment. They farm fungi, raise aphids as livestock, launch armies into war, use chemical sprays to alarm and confuse enemies, capture slaves, engage in child labour, exchange information ceaselessly. They do everything but watch television."
-Lewis Thomas
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"The most solid piece of scientific truth I know of is that we are profoundly ignorant about nature."
-Lewis Thomas
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"I won't compare ants and people, but ants give us a useful model of how single members of a community can become so organized that they end up resembling, in effect, one big collective brain. Our own exploding population and communication technology are leading us that way."
-Lewis Thomas
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"If you want to use a cliche you must take full responsibility for it yourself and not try to fob it off on anon., or on society."
-Lewis Thomas
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"We're as clever as we think we are, but we'll be a lot cleverer when we learn to use not just one brain but to pool huge numbers of brains. We're at a level technologically where we can share information and think collectively about our problems. We do it in science all the time - there's no reason why we can't do it in other endeavors."
-Lewis Thomas
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Same Category
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"Belief and knowledge are considered to be two different things. But they are not."
-Stanley Fish
knowledgeView Quote
"Here, class attendance is expected and students are required to take notes, which they are tested on. What is missing, it seems to me, is the use of knowledge, the practical training."
-Harrison Salisbury
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"Solitude can be used well by very few people. They who do must have a knowledge of the world to see the foolishness of it, and enough virtue to despise all the vanity."
-Abraham Cowley
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"My father was a lawyer and to my best knowledge nobody in my family before had interest in science."
-George Andrew Olah
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"Melville brought to the task a sound knowledge of actual whaling, much curious learning in the literature of the subject, and, above all, an imagination which worked with great power upon the facts of his own experience."
-Carl Clinton Van Doren
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"What is research but a blind date with knowledge?"
-Will Harvey
knowledgeView Quote